Sleep is one of the things the Office lists as unpriceable. It is the eleventh entry and the list is not long. He read it on a leaflet in a waiting room, in the chair nearest the rack, while she was in with the consultant, and has thought about it most nights since, lying beside her while she does not sleep.
So he gives her the one free thing he has.
There is a road, he says, and it is not going anywhere in particular. It has a hedge on one side. On the other side there is a field with nothing planted. It is the afternoon. There is no weather to speak of.
Is anyone on the road, she says.
She asks it the way you check a lock. She was a teacher of small children for nineteen years and can hear a story being managed at fifty paces, and she lets him do it anyway, most nights. On the bad nights she asks the questions that make it harder for him. On the worst nights she asks nothing at all, which is how he knows.
Nobody yet, he says. A gate, further along. It is open. It has been open a long time, from the look of the grass.
Nothing in the story has a name, a color worth keeping, or a number. He tried once to keep a green door in it and woke with the fee already written in his head, four units, payable on waking. No lemon. No music. No one at the gate. He will not put a bill in her head at midnight.
Is anyone at the gate, she says.
No, he says.
Are you, she says.
He does not answer that one. Her hand finds his under the blanket and weighs it, the way you weigh a thing at a stall, and puts it back. She lets it go, and after a while she asks what the field smells like.
He has an answer ready and does not use it. Cut grass would cost her something in the morning, and the morning is where the charges wait.
Nothing, he says. It has been raining and it has stopped.
He lies in the dark and does the sums, which are his, and which he has never said to her out loud: two of them, a hundred and ninety-four between them that would survive a second asking, and a board that goes to three hundred in the new year. He is not going to be the one who crosses and they both know it and neither of them has said it.
Her breathing changes at the gate, most nights. Tonight it changes at the hedge, which is early, and he keeps talking anyway in case she is testing the road, and then he stops.
He turns over. He goes through the road once more himself, on his own account: the hedge, the empty field, the gate that has been open a long time.
Nothing in it is worth a penny. He has made sure. He falls asleep on the good side of the gate, where nothing at all is waiting, and it is free, and it is his.